1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method, and particularly relates to an information processing apparatus and method, whereby the control of a generated code amount at encoding processing can be performed readily and suitably.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, with encoding of moving image data, there has been a method for appropriately controlling the assignment of a generated code amount according to the moving image data thereof.
In order to appropriately encode moving image data so as to reduce the deterioration of image quality of the image thereof (such that a decoded image has high image quality), there has been a method for taking the statistics of the entire moving image, and determining whether to assign how much generated code amount to which portion of which picture (e.g., see Japanese Patent No. 3268306 and Japanese Patent No. 3358620).
Incidentally, in order to encode a moving image with little delay, there has been a method for encoding a part of an image each time it is input, and in this case, there has been a method for determining the assignment of a generated code amount based on the partial statistics of a moving image (e.g., see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 10-136354, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 9-261633, and International Publication WO 96/28937).
For example, with code amount control proposed as a test model in MPEG2 (Moving Picture Experts Group 2), feedback control is performed based on the remaining available amount of virtual buffer, and the relation between the quantization index at the time of previous encoding and a generated code amount.
With regard to such a technique for determining the assignment of a generated code amount based on the partial statistics of a moving image, there have been conceived various types of techniques. For example, there has been a method for assigning a generated code amount of a current picture based on the generated code amount of the past picture, employing the fact that normally, with moving images, the degree of correlation of contents if images is high between temporally adjacent pictures.